Is There A Bellocian Response For Today’s Economic Crisis?

Dear readers of The Distributist Review,

Paul Likoudis, News Editor for The Wanderer -the oldest Catholic newspaper in the United States- recently conducted an interview with yours truly regarding "Bellocian Economics," and has kindly granted us permission to reprint it here. Our thanks go to Mr. Likoudis for the opportunity. We would also like to applaud The Wanderer for their recent defense of distributism.

If you would like to subscribe to the online or hardcopy version of the newspaper, please go to The Wanderer website.

For the benefit of our readers, a Scribd version is below. Please feel free to copy the Scribd version onto your websites, however please add the following link to The Wanderer (http://www.thewandererpress.com/).

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Farm Ownership Linked With Trades Unions

by Reverend John LaFarge, S.J.

Consistently has America probed the causes which keep the labor situation in the United States in perpetual turmoil. It has insisted, in season and out of season, that the internal difficulties which the unions experience are not to be blamed upon the principle of trades-unionism in either form that it may take, whether of the industrial or of the crafts union. It believes that these difficulties are due to personal factors which can be remedied by a change of heart in certain leaders and by the education in the true concept of Christian trades-unionism of the great body of American labor. But another element in the trades-union situation must be reckoned with if trades-unionism is to be saved.

Speaking over the National Farm and Home Hour, William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, declared that “the farmer’s welfare is labor’s welfare. The two are inseparable.” Mr. Green gave as the reason for his statement the “close and direct relationship” that exists between labor’s economy and the farmer’s economy. “This means that the buying power of the farmer depends directly upon the buying power of labor.” Large-scale agriculture, too, has produced a corresponding body of farm laborers, so that agricultural workers’ unions are now forming in fruit and vegetable farming, in beet growing, in onion growing, in large-scale dairies and in fruit and vegetable packing and canning.

It is not the alleged identity of interests between labor and agriculture which is our concern. Indeed, such an identity is vigorously denied by many prominent farm leaders who look upon such identification as mere propaganda for the proposed Farmer-Labor party. We are concerned with the danger to trades-unionism that was pointed out by Dr. Goetz Briefs of Georgetown University at the recent convention in Richmond, of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference: the formation of an ever-increasing wage-earning proletariat due to the vanishing ownership of the land.

The effect of this vanishing ownership, said Dr. Briefs, is to intensify to the point of madness the rivalries among wage-earners, and between wage-earners and their employers. It makes no difference whether it is an industrial or an agricultural wage-earner that is concerned. The bitterness and rivalry, with corresponding difficulty of reaching a solution increase as a greater and greater percentage of our citizens move into the purely wage-earning class, and thus swell the ranks of an eventual proletariat. The terrific pressure upon trades-unionism created by such a situation adds fuel to the flames of internecine labor disputes. A wider and wider area is opened up for the ambitions of organizers and organizations, and, worst of all, youth grows up conceiving of life only in terms of labor with no other idea of man’s temporal existence.

The Catholic Church appeals to charity and justice as the remedy for these disputes. But charity and justice belong to the supernatural order. They are gifts of Divine Grace, and Divine Grace builds upon nature. If that nature is to be restored, there must be a much greater equalization than now prevails between the two main types of wage-earning and the agrarian; and that can only be accomplished by the restoration of private property to the landless proletariat.

Growing tenantry is a sign of the proletarianizing process. In the rural districts, tenantry has increased from thirty-five per cent of the number of farms in 1900 to forty-five percent in 1935. As was shown by Dr. Edgar B. Schmiedeler, O.S.B., Director of the Catholic Rural Life Bureau of the N.C.W.C., this increased tenantry brings with it physical “erosion” of the farms, which are not cared for by those who do not own them; and social “erosion,” in the shape of irresponsible drifters; “vanishing liberty, since renters, like wage-earners, are not the free people that owners are.” But more threatening than that, it means the continuing of the ranks of competing industrial job seekers in the cities.

The Most Rev. Edwin V. O’Hara, Bishop of Great Falls, father of the Catholic Rural Life Conference, resumed recent Papal teaching as: “First, wide diffusion of privately owned property in land; secondly, the ownership of the land by those who operate it; and, thirdly, the desirability of the family-sized farms as opposed to the larger holdings on which farm laborers were little better than serfs.”

How can all this be brought about? The yearly discussions of the Catholic Rural Life Conference have crystallized certain ideas. The opinion has been very positively formed that no amount of mere economic allurement will attach people to the land who are at present disaffected from it. Farming may be made an attractive business for some of the higher-ups in the cotton or the wheat or the dairying oligarchy, or in the large-scale trucking enterprises, but though some way may be devised to make it yield a good living for the little farmers, the multitudes will not be attracted to farming merely because of its paying facilities. Nor will the multitudes be won by any back to the land mysticism, however it may appeal to individuals. Land as a mere money-making agent, or land as an end in itself, does not offer a sufficiently powerful and reliable incentive. People will only learn to appreciate the land and to value land ownership when they look upon it as an instrument; an instrument given to man by the Creator Himself, but an instrument primarily for a spiritual purpose, and only secondarily for the purpose of commercial or monetary profit.

This spiritual purpose is the sustenance and the physical permanence of the farm home, as the seat of the Christian family. This was put very plainly by the Most Rev. Aloysius J. Muench, Bishop of Fargo, as the fifth of six points with which he summed up the topic of religion and rural welfare: “The principles of social justice, effective tenancy legislation, etc., must have their first point in the farm home. The farmstead as a homestead must be cherished as the priceless social institute in the land.”

In a public address a few days before the Richmond meeting, the Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Alexander Troyanovsky, flung down a challenge to the principle of widely distributed, family-sized land ownership as the foundation for a healthy economic life in the nation. It is impossible, said Mr. Troyanovsky, to apply modern technique to the small-sized or family farm. Modern agricultural technique requires large-scale farming, and this means that the only course for American farming is to become collective. That Soviet statement is simply contrary to fact. Where the local community is organized on a cooperative basis, small farms can enjoy every bit of the modern technical facilities—mechanical, electric, biological, etc.,—as are enjoyed in any collective or large-scale enterprise. As was stated by the Conference in a resolution that drew general applause: “We must retain fee-simple ownership of land in small parcels and make technology and scientific research serve this type of land tenure.” A pioneer spirit can use twentieth-century methods.

Behind the Soviet challenge, however, lay a threat of a much deeper nature, a threat that hangs like a cloud over our congressional deliberations at the present time, to the effect that only rigid governmental control can restrain the domination of large-scale farming, curb wasteful competition and greed, and afford sufficient protection to the small farmer. Hence the farmer is confronted with only two entrees on his menu: virtual dictatorship or ruinous laissez-faire. To this challenge we reply:

First, that an immense amount can (and must) be done by the Government, State as well as Federal, to encourage distributed land-ownership and the useful organization of rural economy which does not fall into the class of rigid control or virtual dictatorship. As Bishop Muench noted in the third of his six points, the state can “safeguard the farmers’ interests in the sale of property so that that acquisition of private property is possible.” Taxes can favor small-scale ownership without invading the rights of individuals or destroying all private initiative. Taxation, said Senator Arthur Capper of Kansas at the recent opening of Congress, should favor the family-size farm. Governmental credit can be organized to help the small owner quite as much as the large.

Second, the amount that can be accomplished in this direction by voluntary effort is woefully underestimated. An experiment like that of Father Ligutti in Granger, Iowa, would have been thought utterly impracticable a few years ago. Yet Father Ligutti’s Slavs and Italians have demonstrated a high degree of self-subsistence and skillful utilization of modern technical resources within a framework provided for them through Federal aid. Other experiments spring up daily, all of them in one form or another teaching that no limit has yet been found to the efficacy of cooperation on Christian—not on merely materialistic—lines. The surface of cooperation between city and country groups, between producer and consumer, on a voluntary and regional basis, has hardly been scratched. How many charitable individuals, for instance, in our large cities, have experimented in a most eminently practical form of cooperation, that of making loans, on long-term payments, to young families starting life in the country? Incredibly little has been done in the field of voluntary international cooperation. We talk of export and surpluses as if these things were decreed by the gods on Olympus. Yet they are amenable to voluntary understandings which transcend governmental lines.

At the present time I know of at least one Catholic rural community which is trying to organize itself upon a cooperative basis. Pastor and Sisters are leading in the work. The community is in the East, and is fairly accessible to large centres. Let us suppose that a city Catholic, with some means and some leisure, were to interest himself in the affairs of such a community, were to spend a certain part of his time therein, study on the spot its possibilities for the exemplification of the Christian cooperative, confer with the local men and women who are trying to put the program across, and extend a certain amount of practical aid to the initial ventures—what an immense amount of good could be accomplished for the Catholic social program! Why should a community of decent, self-respecting people, of our own Faith, be obliged always to choose between the dismal alternatives of starting from absolute scratch, or else applying for Federal bounties which are granted only upon rigidly specified lines, entail heavy obligations and dependencies, and, anyhow, do not touch this sort of effort.

While I was writing this paragraph, Father McGoey, of Toronto, dropped in, who has accomplished such wonders in establishing his forty practically self-sustaining families, with their 241 souls, upon the land. He sees a plenty of ways which an intelligent, city Catholic can aid such a rural community. He can help the cooperatives to finance their project. He can help provide outlets in the city, such as a consumer’s organization, for the community’s produce. He can assist the rural community in getting books and furniture for a rural library. But the useful task of all, in Father McGoey’s opinion, for the city person, is to bring the rural dweller to a better appreciation of his own opportunities. This he can do best if he is himself a man who has made a successful career of city life, and so can add realism to his own comparisons.

Finally, it seems to me that we vastly underestimate, in this, as in other matters pertaining to social justice, the immense efficacy of a widespread popular education in the principles of a right order. Were our Catholic periodicals—speaking of Catholics alone—and our Catholic lecturers and preachers and professors of sociology and economics throughout the country to unite upon a wide and general program of educating the American as to the evils of proletarianism, the necessity of distributed private ownership and the family social unit, the nature and efficacy of Christian cooperation and Christian cooperatives, the possibilities, spiritual cultural of Catholic parish life, a definite brake would be put upon the centralizing and depersonalizing theories of agrarian economy which are now invading political circles. The majority of thinking farm leaders welcome these basic truths when they are explained to them. “We simply must accept your Catholic family-economics program,” said the non-Catholic President of a secular college in conversation with a delegate to the Richmond convention. We have had, I believe, altogether too much agrarian defeatism. Let us begin to market the harvest of knowledge which alone can stop the Bolshevist weed from springing up and choking industry and agriculture to death.

From America Magazine (1937)
Farm Ownership Linked With Trades Unions: The Catholic plan replies to a Soviet challenge

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The Obstacle of Industrialism

by A.J. Penty

Not the least of the obstacles that stand in the way of a return of Christendom is the monstrous disproportion that exists between the material and spiritual sides of life. For centuries, and especially since the Industrial Revolution, a larger and larger proportion of our energies have been devoted to the increase and development of our material resources, with the result that the balance between the material and spiritual sides of life which is indispensable to any healthy and normal civilization has been entirely destroyed, and the spiritual life almost crushed out of existence by the dead weight of material preoccupations.

The fact that undue concentration on material things tends to choke the spiritual life was over and over again insisted upon by Jesus Christ. "Take ye no thought, saying. What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or where-withal shall we be clothed (for after all these things do the Gentiles seek)? for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." This is the true political economy; it is the political economy of Christendom, and it is because in some measure the Medievalists pursued this ideal that they were not perplexed by the problem of riches and poverty as it perplexes us to-day. Industrialism is the organization of society on the opposite assumption, "Seek ye first," it says, "material prosperity, and all other things shall be added unto you." But somehow or other it does not work out. These other things are not added, and in the long run the pursuit of riches does not even bring material prosperity. For the concentration of all effort and mental energy upon material achievement upsets the spiritual equilibrium of society. It produces contrasts of wealth and poverty, and out of these come envy, jealousy, class hatreds, economic and military warfare, and finally the destruction of the wealth that has been so laboriously created. For no society built on a lie can endure.

Our industrial society exhibits a spirit that shows itself irreconcilably hostile to all the higher interests of mankind, and all men who care for spiritual things are conscious of this antagonism. Yet as a nation we lack the , courage to face the fact that Industrialism is incompatible with the spiritual life. In the Middle Ages, when the material development of civilization was in its infancy, there were not wanting men to protest with all their might against the corrupting influence of wealth and luxury. St. Francis, in the thirteenth century even, sought to counter the evil by preaching the Gospel of Poverty, and at a later date sumptuary laws were enacted to put a boundary to the growth of personal extravagance, for many people saw the social dangers attendant upon an increase of luxury. In Germany, which in the Middle Ages was the most prosperous country in Europe, extravagance and luxury grew at an alarming pace towards the end of the fifteenth century. Many of the merchants had become richer than kings and emperors, and vanity had prompted them to give visible evidence of their great riches in the adoption of a higher and higher standard of living.

Feasting and gambling increased, while extravagance in dress became the order of the day. Commenting on this, Wimpheling, who was one of the most widely read authors of the period, said that "wealth and prosperity are attended with great dangers, as we see exemplified: they induce extravagance in dress, in banqueting, and what is still worse, they engender a desire for still more. This desire debases the mind of man and degenerates into contempt of God, His Church, and His Commandments." And experience was to prove it led to social catastrophe. The peril arises from the fact that, as extravagance increases, a kind of social compulsion is brought to bear upon others to live up to it whether they can afford to do so or not, and as only the rich can afford to keep up with the standard thus set, a point is soon reached when the need of money is very widely felt. When that point was reached in Germany the same thing happened that has happened with us to-day. Nobody wanted to do any really productive work, but everybody wanted to go into trade where money was to be made. Mercantile houses, shops, and taverns multiplied inordinately, and complaints were made that there was no money but only debts, and that whole districts were drained by usury. The growth of this state of things was followed by the attempt which each class made to save itself from bankruptcy by transferring its burdens on to the shoulders of the class beneath it, which led to the progressive impoverishment of the working class, who had to bear the brunt because the burden could be shifted no farther. Then there arose a bitter enmity between the propertied and the unpropertied classes, and class hatred increased in intensity until finally it led in 1524 to the Peasants' War, which convulsed almost every corner of the Empire from the Alps to the Baltic.

We see then that in attacking extravagance and luxury the Church has been led by a true social instinct. But it becomes daily more evident that to attack extravagance and luxury is not enough. It is necessary to attack those general principles and assumptions of our social and industrial system which of their own nature tend to promote such vices. This fact has of late received some recognition by the Church. The Report of the Archbishop's Committee on "Christianity and Industrial Problems" marks an advance in thought to the extent that it has broken away from that purely personal explanation of social phenomena which satisfied most Churchmen until yesterday, and has recognized that "charity'' with the Church has not been interpreted (as it should be) as "a sort of glorified justice" that "looks at least as much to the prevention of evil as to its cure. On the contrary, it has meant far too exclusively what may be called ambulance work for mankind—the picking up of the wounded and the curing of their wounds." "We have," says the Report, "neglected to attack the forces of wrong. We have been content with the ambulance work when we ought to have been assaulting the strongholds of evil."

In laying down the broad principles which should govern the conduct of Christians in their relation to social questions nothing could be more admirable than this Report. But as it proceeds, the clear vision that marks the early part of the Report gets bedimmed and the writers get entangled in the economic defences of the existing system. Their protests are silenced by those pleas of economic necessity behind which the upholders of the existing order take cover. Thus while on the one hand luxury is attacked, on the other the Report hesitates to carry its attack to its logical conclusion by condemning root and branch those quantitative conceptions upon which our industrial system is based. For it is undoubtedly true that the progressive growth of luxury is a necessary condition of the continued existence of a system that is based upon conceptions of indefinite industrial expansion. It is not too much to say that people nowadays are goaded by advertisers into becoming luxurious. Indeed, unless a man is poor, his difficulty nowadays is how to avoid becoming luxurious, for circumstances combine to force, the individual along the path of luxury whether he likes it or not, and people succumb to luxurious tendencies because they are afraid to appear mean. It may be admitted that expenditure need not be luxurious though it pass the bounds of necessity. Expenditure on the arts, for instance, is of this nature. But this is not the kind of expenditure that is encouraged by latter-day conceptions of industrial expansion. On the contrary, what is encouraged in every sort of vain and useless expenditure on all kinds of things that people would be better without; while the dilemma in which we are placed is that such useless expenditure is necessary to keep the wheels of industry running. There is plenty of unemployment to-day, yet under our existing system if the rich could be induced to abandon luxury unemployment would be actually increased. Hence it is that until we have the courage to attack the principles upon which the industrial system is built there can be no escape from this fundamental dilemma.

This kind of inconsistency must come to an end. We must frankly recognize that the purely quantitative standard is antipathetic to everything that Christianity stands for, for not until we do shall we be able to translate our ideals into the terms of actuality. We must oppose the conception of "maximum production" with that of a "sufficient production." Quantity up to a certain point of course we must have, but we must break with the theory that exalts a standard of quantity as the final test of industrial righteousness, since so long as we accept such a standard, the time will never come when we can say we have produced enough. Appearances will always be against a return to sanity, because when production proceeds beyond a certain point it upsets distribution; and by upsetting distribution, competition is increased and unemployment and poverty is created. The widespread existence of such poverty in turn lends a colour to the demand for still more production, and so we go on from bad to worse, driven from one desperate expedient to another in a vain effort to escape from the consequences of exalting the quantitative standard. The remedy is for us to refuse any longer to sacrifice Christian principles to economic expediency. We can be perfectly assured that what is wrong morally is bad economics; and that professors of economics who maintain the contrary suffer from a constitutional inability to distinguish between appearance and reality.

When we search for an explanation of current fallacies of economics we find that they rest finally on a false philosophy of life—on the belief that work at the best is a disagreeable necessity that it is desirable to reduce to a minimum. In former times it was the normal thing for men to find pleasure and satisfaction in their work. But this is no longer the case. The vast majority of people to-day do not look for any such pleasure or satisfaction. They work in order to get money to live. Their hearts are not in their work, their real interests are outside, either in the pursuit of pleasure, or in some hobby or occupation extraneous to their daily work. Not only do they do as little as they can, but what they do is done in a coeval and slovenly way. The grudging and resentful temper engendered by their daily work infects the whole of life. Character deteriorates: men become restless and dissatisfied. It would matter little if the hours of work were reduced to four or even two hours a day. They would still be restless and dissatisfied. For they would still be in a fundamentally wrong relation to life, and that fact would vitiate the extra leisure they had gained. Men are not men until they have found their true vocation and ministry. When Carlyle said, "Blessed is the man who has found his work : let him ask no other blessedness," he was expressing one of the primary truths of Christian ethics.

All Christians must deplore this demoralization that has overtaken the modern world, and many Christian moralists, recognizing the evil, have attempted to combat it. But they have all failed. They have failed to establish points of contact with the modern mind, and this for the simple reason that they have chosen to ignore the vital facts of the situation. With men to-day as in the past it would be the normal and natural thing for them to find pleasure in their work were it not that they are prevented from doing so by circumstances. Their work fails to inspire them for two reasons. Firstly because as it is done at the dictation and in the interests of profiteers, they cannot feel the call of service; and secondly, because under our industrial system work has become so monotonous that everyone is bored by it.

Recognizing these facts, any analysis of the problem of work and industry that would grapple with the realities of the situation must reassert the claims of the producer. It may be true that the needs of the consumer are the primary basis of any economic system. Yet the producer has equal claims for consideration, since an analysis based entirely upon the needs of the consumer will, if carried to its logical conclusion, lead inevitably to the enslavement and degradation of the producer, for instead of being regarded as a human being he will come to be regarded merely as an instrument for the increase of wealth. To such an extent has development proceeded in this direction that the only way to restore a condition of normality in industry is to assert the claims of the producer, affirming self-expression through work to be a spiritual necessity. The moment we assert this we come into collision with Industrialism as a machine producing wealth, no matter how equitably its products could under some future system be distributed, because it denies all opportunities whatsoever for self-expression.

Industrialism destroys interest in work because it tends towards an ever increasing specialization. This is the key to the problem. We are accustomed to associate the evil with the spread of machine production, but strictly speaking the evil does not reside in machinery, but in the subdivision of labour which preceded the introduction of machinery and which is responsible for its misapplication. And here it is necessary to distinguish between the division of labour which is legitimate and the subdivision of labour which is illegitimate. The former is a necessity in every civilized community, for it is obvious that a man cannot supply all his own needs, since to some extent he is inevitably dependent upon others. No sooner did civilization begin to develop than this necessity brought about the specialization of men into different trades. One man became a weaver, another a carpenter, and so forth. Up to this point the division of labour is justified, not merely because it is a necessity of civilization, but because it enlarges the opportunities of expression of the individual. What, however, we understand by the subdivision of labour is measures taken to increase the output in the interests of profiteering by splitting up a trade into a great number of separate processes. This we must condemn, because by reducing men to automation it undermines their moral and spiritual life and disintegrates personality, while it leads inevitably to sweating and economic insecurity. This system came into existence in the early part of the seventeenth century, the classical example being that eulogized by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, namely pin-making, in which industry, he explained, it takes twenty men to make a pin, each man being specialized on a single process for a lifetime. In our day this method has reached its logical conclusion in the system known as "scientific management." The subdivision of labour attacks the craft; scientific (management attacks the man. Its acknowledged object is further to increase output by the elimination of all the motions of the arms and fingers and body that do not directly contribute to the fashioning of the article under process of manufacture. As such it completes the dehumanization and despiritualization of labour begun by the subdivision of labour.

Now it is apparent that the value to be placed upon such a method of work will depend upon our philosophy of life. If we are materialists and are convinced that the great end of life is to increase wealth—profit and commodities—regardless of the use to which the commodities are put or the degradation of the workers through the methods employed in their production, then we shall regard even such a system as scientific management as evidence of progress. But if we believe as Christians in the aboriginal and imperishable worth of the individual, we shall condemn the system as essentially anti-Christian. We shall maintain that any increase of wealth obtained by such means carries with it a curse, inasmuch as it ignores the sacredness of human personality and degrades man to the level of a machine.

The principle of the subdivision of labour has penetrated into every department of human activity. Overspecialization is the bane of the modern world. It affects the intellectual world, not perhaps to the same degree, but with results that are as potent for evil as those which we deplore in the world of labour. For just as the machine-tender becomes atrophied in certain directions, so the intellectual specialist develops one side of his mind at the expense of other sides, and thereby loses that balance and judgment which are essential to work of permanent value. It is said that in Germany before the War specialization among intellectual workers had reached such a degree of development that men tended to become monomaniacs on one subject, or even one small part of a subject, to the detriment of general culture. This was the Culture that gave to the Germans their sense of superiority over other peoples and was a contributory cause of the War. Specialization up to a certain point we must have if civilization is to exist at all. But a limit must be placed somewhere if men are not to disintegrate morally, intellectually, and spiritually, and to imperil the stability of civilization. An intimate connection exists between the convulsions which have overtaken society and this over-specialization; since when specialization is complete it breaks up society, because the co-ordinating idea which binds men together no longer operates. It is the corollary of that isolation of the soul which Mr. Belloc rightly sees as the fruit of the Reformation.

I said that to the development of specialization a limit must be placed somewhere. That limit, I submit, should be placed at the point craft development had reached before the division of labour degenerated into the subdivision of labour. To suffer specialization to proceed farther is, to use an engineering term "to trespass on the margin of safety." In calculating the strengths of the material he uses, the engineer keeps well within the margin of safety, for he knows that all structures suffer from wear and tear and may at some time or other be subjected to an exceptional strain, and therefore in common prudence he makes allowances for such contingencies in his calculations, distinguishing clearly between a "safe load" and a "breaking load." A sane sociology would make a corresponding destruction. It would recognize that there was a limit beyond which productivity could not be increased without imperilling the stability of the social structure. It would condemn the subdivision of labour because it trespassed on the margin of psychological safety and indefinite industrial expansion because it trespassed on the margin of economic safety. Failure to recognize the truth of this principle is responsible for the disintegration of society to-day. Though it is only since the War that our peril has received any public recognition, the process of disintegration has nevertheless been at work since the seventeenth century, when the subdivision of labour was instituted. If, then, society is to be reconstructed on a stable basis, productivity must not be allowed to trespass on the margin of safety; in other words, we must repudiate the subdivision of labour and return to the handicrafts as the basis of production, using machinery only in an accessory way.

It is now some seventy years since Ruskin wrote his impassioned protests against the human degradation involved in the subdivision of labour. Yet it is only of late that any signs have been forthcoming that his protests have not been entirely in vain. Thus in the Report of the American Committee on "The Church and Industrial Reconstruction" we read: "The tendency to regard labour simply as a means of production has been greatly intensified by modem machinery which has often had the effect of reducing the man almost to the level of a machine. He is left to do what inventive genius is unable to design a machine to do. The process of manufacture is carried to a higher and higher degree of specialization, until the worker's task tends to become a deadening routine and he himself hardly more than a semi-mechanical part of the factory. These conditions almost inevitably result in the loss of the sense of personal creation and fine craftsmanship. In the simpler days before the advent of large-scale production the worker helped to plan the work and with his own strength and skill to carry it into execution. In such a task a man could really find self-expression. But now he does not plan the work or any part of it, and everything except the monotonous details is accomplished by an automatic machine. The work no longer seems really his. The factory, therefore, means barren monotony for millions of men, deadens their imagination, and robs them of any sense of creative joy, and in these results we have had an altogether too complacent acquiescence. If we are seriously concerned about the development of personality we ought to be earnestly seeking ways of affording to modern workers opportunity for self-expression in their tasks by giving tihem industrial education and making it possible for them to share in directing the industry as a whole. At the very least we ought to guarantee them sufficient leisure for self -development in other activities outside the factory. We have shown an inexcusable apathy towards this destruction of human values in the process of producing things. We have been concerned with impersonal goods, with profits and dividends, forgetting that the factor we indifferently spoke of as 'labour' is nothing less than immortal souls for whom the Lord Christ died."

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All the Way to Heaven is Heaven

by Dorothy Day

About a month ago, Douglas Hyde, one of the editors of the London Daily Worker, became a Catholic. In an article in the Catholic Herald of England, he wrote:

"In 1943, I libeled, in the course of my work on The Daily Worker, a Catholic paper, the Weekly Review, and a number of its contributors. In preparation for an anticipated court case, which in fact, was never heard, I read through the paper's files for the preceding year and studied each issue as it appeared.

"I had accused it of providing a platform for Fascists at a moment when Fascist bombs were raining down on Britain. I came in time to realize that not only had I libeled it in law but also in fact.

"For years my cultural interests had been in the middle ages. My favorite music was also pre-Purcell, in architecture my interest was in Norman and Gothic, in literature my favorites were Chaucer and Langland. We had a family joke which we made each year when holidays were discussed. "Let's go on a trip to the thirteenth century."

"And these were the interests of the people behind the Weekly Review. I came to look forward to the days when it appeared on my desk. A natural development was that I became increasingly interested in the writings of Chesterton and Belloc....

"A good Communist must never permit himself to think outside his Communism. I had done so and the consequences were bound to be fatal to my Communism.

"That, as it were, is the mechanics of my introduction to Catholicism."

Not long ago at a mass meeting of the workers in a Finnish factory when the question was asked which they would prefer, Communism or Capitalism, they shouted, "Neither."

Fr. Parsons in his letter in our anniversary issue said that he loved us best when we were fighting for something, so let us begin this new series of articles, similar to THE CHURCH AND WORK. We will probably slash out now and again in the fray of battle, at Fr. Higgins, for instance, who makes fun of the Distributists, and at the ACTU, the members of which are our very good friends. (We are just trying to improve their vision.) And at those who say that it is too late for anything but love, and on the one hand, just read St. John of the Cross and seek for perfection; or on the other hand just make your Easter duty and be ordinary good Catholics. The Pope and the Bishops say that secularism is the curse of our time. We cannot separate soul and body. We cannot separate the week from Sunday. A man's work, whereby he eats, is important.

In other words, it is never too late to begin. It is never too late to turn over a new leaf. In spite of the atom bomb, the jet plane, the conflict with Russia, ten just men may still save the city.

Maybe if we keep on writing and talking, there will be other conversions like Mr. Hyde's. It was reading an article that got Fr. Damien his leper at Molokai. It was reading that converted St. Augustine. So we will keep on writing.

And talking, too. They always said in England that the Distributists did nothing but talk. But one needs to talk to convey ideas. St. Paul talked so much and so long that in the crowded room one young lad, sitting on the window sill, fell out of the window and was killed, like a woman down the street from us, last week. Only she was not listening to the word of God, but washing windows on a Sunday morning. And it was sad that there was no St. Paul to bring her to life. Her life finished there. But we are still alive, though we live in a city of ten million and one can scarcely call it life, and the papers every day carry news of new weapons of death.

However, we are still here. We are still marrying and having children, and having to feed them and house them and clothe them. We don't want them to grow up and say, "This city is such hell, that perhaps war will be preferable. This working in a laundry, a brass factory, the kitchen of a restaurant, is hell on earth. At least, war will teach me new trades, which the public school system has failed to do. This coming home at night to a four-room, or a two room tenement flat and a wife and three children with whooping cough (there are usually not more than three children in the city ) is also hell. And what can be done about it? We are taught to suffer, to embrace the cross. On the other hand, St. Catherine said, "All the way to heaven is heaven, because He said I am the Way." And He was a carpenter and wandered the roadsides of Palestine and lived in the fields and plucked the grain to eat on a Sunday as he wandered with His disciples.

This morning as I went to Mass my eyes stung from the fumes of the cars on Canal street. I crossed a vacant lot, a parking lot filled with cinders and broken glass and longed for an ailanthus tree to break the prison-gray walls and ground all around. Last night all of us from Mott street were at a meeting at Friendship House to hear Leslie Green, Distributist, and the talk was good and stimulating so that in spite of the noise, the fumes, the apathy which the city brings, I was impelled this morning to begin this series. My son-in-law, David Hennessy, of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, who has a toehold on the land, has also been deluging me with pamphlets. He has one of the best libraries in the country on the subject, and deals with the books and pamphlets which discuss Distributism. He will help with this series, and send literature to those who ask for it. The address is given in an ad in this issue.

He has one of many toeholds on the land. We could list perhaps fifty among our friends and if we went through our files, we could find many more. These toeholds have meant, however, that the young, married couples had a little stake to start with. They had, or could borrow a bit of money to make a down payment on a farm. Their families could give them a start if it was only a few hundred dollars. (There was an ad in the New York Times yesterday of a farm for sale for $1,200, three hundred down and $25 a month.) Even with the bit of money, however, faith, vision, some knowledge of farming or a craft, are needed. People need to prepare themselves. Parents need to prepare their children.

On the one hand there are already some toeholds on the land; there are those farmers already there who have the right philosophy; there is still time, since we have not yet a socialist government or nationalization of the land. We have some government control, but not much yet. Not compared to what there may be soon.

On the other hand, there are such stories as that in the last issue of Commonweal about the de Gorgio strike in the long central valley of California, of 58,000 acres owned by one family, of 2,000 employees, of horrible living conditions, poor wages, forced idleness "times of repose" between crops, when machines are cared for but not men, women and children. "The Grapes of Wrath" pattern is here, is becoming an accepted pattern. Assembly line production in the factory, and mass production on the land are part of a social order accepted by the great mass of our Catholics, priests and people. Even when they admit it is bad, they say, "What can we do?" And the result is palliatives, taking care of the wrecks of the social order, rather than changing it so that there would not be quite so many broken homes, orphaned children, delinquents, industrial accidents, so much destitution in general.

Palliatives, when what we need is a revolution, beginning now. Each one of us can help start it. It is no use talking about how bored we are with the word. Let us not be escapists but admit that it is upon us. We are going to have it imposed upon us, or we're going to make our own.

If we don't do something about it, the world may well say, "Why bring children into the world, the world being what it is?" We bring them into it and start giving them a vision of an integrated life so that they too can start fighting.

This fighting for a cause is part of the zest of life. Fr. Damasus said once at one of our retreats, that people seemed to have lost that zest for life, that appreciation of the value of life, the gift of life. It is a fundamental thing. Helene Isvolsky in a lecture on Dostoevsky at the Catholic Worker house, last month, said that he was marked by that love for life. He had almost been shot once. He had been lined up with other prisoners and all but lost his life. From then on he had such a love for life that it glowed forth in all his writings. It is what marks the writings of Thomas Wolfe, whose life was torrential, whose writing was a Niagara.

But how can one have a zest for life under such conditions as those we live in at 115Mott street? How can that laundry worker down the street, working in his steamy hell of a basement all day, wake each morning to a zest for life?

In the city very often one lives in one's writing. Writing is not an overflow of life, a result of living intensely. To live in Newburgh, on the farm, to be arranging retreats, to be making bread and butter, taking care of and feeding some children there, washing and carding wool, gathering herbs and salads and flowers--all these things are so good and beautiful that one does not want to take time to write except that one has to share them, and not just the knowledge of them, but how to start to achieve them.

The whole retreat movement is to teach people to "meditate in their hearts," to start to think of these things, to make a beginning, to go out and start to love God in all the little things of every day, to so make one's life and one's children's life a sample of heaven, a beginning of heaven

The retreats are to build up a desire, a knowledge of what to desire. "Make me desire to walk in the way of Thy commandments." Daniel was a man of "desires." Our Lord is called "the desire of the everlasting hills."

Yes, we must write of these things, of the love of God and the love of His creatures, man and beast, and plant and stone.

"You make it sound too nice," my daughter once said to me, "when I was writing of life on the land, and voluntary and involuntary poverty which means in specific instances the doing without water, heat, washing machines, cars, electricity and many other things, even for a time the company of our fellows, in order to make a start.

And others have said the same thing, who are making a start on the land. And I know well what they mean. One must keep on trying to do it oneself, and one must keep on trying to help others to get these ideas respected.

At Grailville, Ohio, there is not only the big school where there is electricity, modern plumbing, a certain amount of machinery that makes the work go easier and gives time for studies; but there is also a sample farm, twelve acres, with no electricity, no modern plumbing, no hot water, where the washing is done outside over tubs and an open fire, and yet there, too, the life is most beautiful, and a foretaste of heaven. There one can see how all things show forth the glory of God, and how "All the way to heaven is heaven,"

Artists and writers, as I have often said, go in for voluntary poverty in order to "live their own lives and do the work they want to do." I know many a Hollywood writer who thought they were going out there to earn enough to leave to buy a little farm and settle down and do some really good writing. But the fleshpots of Egypt held them. And I knew many a Communist who had his little place in the country, private ownership too, and not just a rented place, a vacation place.

Property is proper to man. Man is born to work by the sweat of his brow, and he needs the tools, the land to work with.

This article is but an introduction to a series of articles on what has been written and thought about Distributism.

The principles of Distributism have been more or less implicit in much that we have written for a long time. We have advised our readers to begin with four books, Chesterton's What's Wrong With the World, The Outline of Sanity, and Belloc's The Servile State and The Restoration of Property.

These are the books which Douglas Hyde must have read which gave him the third point of view, neither industrial capitalist or communist.

In a brief pamphlet by S. Sagar, made up of a collection of articles which ran in The Weekly Review, distributism is described as follows:

To live, man needs land (on which to have shelter, to cultivate food, to have a shop for his tools) and capital, which may be those tools, or seeds, or materials.

"Further, he must have some arrangement about the control of these two things. Some arrangement there must obviously be, and to make such an arrangement is one of the reasons why man forms communities." -- Men being what they are, every society must make laws to govern the control of land and capital.

The principle from which the law can start is "that all its subjects should exercise control of Land and Capital by means of direct family ownership of these things. This, of course, is the principle from which, until yesterday, our own law started. It was the theory of capitalism under which all were free to own, none compelled by law to labor." (Popular magazines like Time and the Saturday Evening Post are filled with illustrations of these principles, which all men admit are good, but unfortunately the stories told are not true. It is the reason why great trusts like the Standard Oil and General Motors have public relations men, why there is a propaganda machine for big business, to convert the public to the belief that capitalism really is based on good principles, distributists' principles, really is working out for the benefit of all, so that men have homes and farms and tools and pride in the job.) "Unfortunately, in practice, under capitalism the many had not opportunity of obtaining land and capital in any useful amount and were compelled by physical necessity to labor for the fortunate few who possessed these things. But the theory was all right. Distributists want to save the theory by bringing the practice in conformity with it....

"Distributists want to distribute control as widely as possible by means of a direct family ownership of Land and Capital. This, of course, means cooperation among these personal owners and involves modifications, complexities and compromises which will be taken up later.

"THE AIM OF DISTRIBUTISM IS FAMILY OWNERSHIP OF LAND, WORKSHOPS, STORES, TRANSPORT, TRADES, PROFESSIONS, AND SO ON.

"Family ownership in the means of production so widely distributed as to be the mark of the economic life of the community--this is the Distributist's desire. It is also the world's desire.... The vast majority of men who argue against Distributism do so not on the grounds that it is undesirable but on the grounds that it is impossible. We say that it must be attempted, and we must continue to emphasize the results of not attempting it."

In the next issue of the paper we will continue with a number of articles dealing with these problems.

Catholic Worker

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Distributist Materials

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What Is Distributism?

An Introduction to Distributism

The Society for Distributism Brochure

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Leo XIII And Labour

by Charles J. O'Malley

There are men who make history and there are documents that make civilization. Leo XIII. was one of the greatest makers of history that the Nineteenth century knew. He was more. Generations hence it will be said of him that he was one of the greatest builders of civilization his age produced. It is a matter of simple truth to say that no states man of his day exerted as powerful an influence on the age, and it is certain no thinker of the century just closed did so much to restore right social order for the future. During life Pope Leo XIII was often classed with Gladstone and Bismarck; yet he was greater than they. They were at best, solicitious only for the welfare of single nations. Leo XIII struggled to bring about the uplift of all nations. No man of his age strove so earnestly to make universal justice prevail. More spiritual than Gladstone, more farseeing than Bismarck, more philosophical than both combined, after ages will show that in the work of preserving social order he was the greatest force the Nineteenth century produced.

A proof of this may be found in the now world-famous encyclical, "On the Condition of Labor." Officially styled the encyclical Rerum Novarum, obviously it had its base in that vigorous pronouncement against Socialism, Communism and Xihilism issued December 28, 1878. The encyclical on labor was issued May 15, 1891, but in reality it must be regarded as a supplement to the former. This is true because political agitators of that day had almost inextricably bound the social question and the question of labor together. In the former Leo had insisted that it was the duty of all who had authority or wealth to make better the condition of those who toil. It was their duty, he asserted, to see that the laborer should have his proper wages. In the latter he insisted even more urgently that justice ought to be done. In the first he warned against the acceptance of false ideals, which, put in operation, would bring about the destruction of Christian faith, the Christian home and that civilization which grew out of Christianity; yet urged at the same time that evils existed which ought to be rooted out. In the latter he showed rulers and employers and those employed how they could be changed without injury to the existing system. The tone of the encyclical was one of sympathy for the oppressed. "Some remedy," he urged, "must be found, and found quickly, for the misery and wretchedness pressing so heavily and so unjustly, even at this moment, on the vast majority of the working classes. The custom of working by contract, and the concentration of so many branches of trade in the hands of a few individuals, have brought about a condition of affairs in which a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the masses of laboring poor a yoke little better than slavery itself."

Strong as this is, and as far-seeing as it is vigorous, the "Great White Shepherd," as some one has called him, was not content with mere statements. The right of man to own private property was next considered. He declared it man's natural right. "To affirm that God has given the earth for the use and enjoyment of the whole human race, is not to deny that private property is lawful. The earth has been granted to mankind in general, not in the sense that all without distinction can deal with it as they like, but rather that no part of it has been assigned forever to any one in particular, and that the limits of private possession have been left to be fixed by man's own industry and by the laws of individual races. Is it just that the fruit of one's own sweat and labor shall be possessed and enjoyed by some one else? As effects follow their cause, so is it just and right that the results of labor should belong to those who have bestowed the labor."

So spoke the "workingman's Pope" on the right of each individual to use and to enjoy that which his toil earned. Yet even this did not fill up the measure of his solicitude. With Socialism preaching its alluring doctrine throughout the earth, he felt that again it must be analyzed and its evil principles exposed. Turning to its main tenet community of goods he showed that it must be rejected, since it would only injure those it would seem to benefit. It would utterly destroy the system of wages and introduce widespread confusion and disorder. It would be impossible, he declared, to reduce civil society to a dead level. Socialists may do their utmost to that end, but all such striving against nature is in vain. There naturally exists among mankind manifold differences of the most important order. People differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal conditions. All this, the Pope goes on to explain, is part of the lot of humanity, and has to be accepted as such. ~No strength and no artifice will ever succeed in wholly banishing from human life some of the ills and inequalities which beset it. The Pope utterly condemns the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the capitalist and laborer are intended by nature to live in conflict. Capital cannot do without labor or labor with out capital. In the precepts of religion, the Pope declares, is to be found the guidance of each class with regard to its duties towards others. Religion teaches the laboring class to carry out honestly and fairly all equitable agreements entered into; never to injure the property or to attack the person of an employer; never to resort to violence or to engage in any riot or disorder. Religion teaches the wealthy owner and employer that their work-people are not to be accounted their bondmen, and that it is shameful and inhuman to treat men like chattels to make money by, or to look upon them merely as so much muscle or physical power. The employer must never tax his work people beyond their strength, or employ them in work unsuited to their age or sex. All masters of labor "should be mindful of this, that to exercise pressure upon the indigent and destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one s profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and Divine."

It is often objected by Socialist leaders of our day that Leo XIII analyzed existing evils well, but prescribed no remedy. The statement is untrue as often as it is made. We have seen that he advised the application of the teachings of Christianity. He even went further. He urged the organization of societies of Christian workingmen, and declared that they ought to be protected by the state. The state, moreover, he asserts, ought to protect the rights of those who toil by seeing to it that just laws be passed and enforced protecting the interests of laborers. Shorter hours ought to be provided, the virtue of female laborers ought to be insured by legal enactment, and finally child labor ought to be abolished by the state. Every person who labors ought to be given wages sufficient to provide frugal comforts for himself and family. The law of the various countries, declared this statesman, ought to be so executed that they shall make for justice. Since justice is all that can be desired, what more do the agitators desire? "What other could they expect Leo XIII to suggest?

Here it may be well to ask how this tremendously important document was received by the civilized world? Could such a pronouncement be delivered without exciting almost universal comment? Obviously, it could not. Catholic thinkers, of course, applauded; yet it is true that the non-Catholic world was not chary in commendation. In England the London Times declared that it "abounded in observations worthy universal attention, and breathed a spirit of Christian charity which, if imitated, would go far to resolve all the industrial questions of the epoch." The St. James Gazette asserted that it manifested "an ardent love for the working people, many passages being inflamed with an eloquent anger against the inhuman abuses which too often find their way into industry and commerce!" The Guardian, the English High Church organ, warmly commended it, saying that "in all questions which concern labor the Catholic Church instantly puts itself on the side of the working population." "Its effect," continued that journal, "will be of immense importance in the development of the social question, and it will be so, also, without doubt for the future of the Catholic Church. The Anglican Bishop of Winchester declares that if the Pope were not listened to "the world will have to expiate its neglect by some terrible calamities." In France commendation was equally strong from opponents of the church. Barres, a Socialist leader in the Chamber of Deputies, declared that, "given a few years to efface existing mistrusts, and the Democracy would no longer see an enemy in the priest." Leroy-Beaulieu, the Socialist, in "The Papacy, Socialism and Democracy," declared the world was beholding "the return to the stage of one of the greatest actors in history." Emile Olivier, also a Socialist, asked in comment, "when has not the church sided with the poor? When has it ever failed to spread over them its maternal wings?" Vorwarts, the great organ of German Socialism, asserted that the Pope had "gone in advance of all princes and all governments of civilized states, and has resolved the social question. He has resolved the social question so far as it is given to any existing power to resolve it." Now that the church in this country is engaged in a conflict with Socialism, the foregoing quotations certainly have a timely value.

Nor was there lack of analysis and commendation in our own country. The American mind is quick to grasp every discussion that is of value. Nearly two years afterwards the great encyclical was thus analyzed in an address by H. C. Simple, of Montgomery, Ala., in the Columbian Catholic Congress held in Chicago:

The platform of Catholics on the condition of labor was announced by Leo XIII. in the encyclical Kerum Novarum. This paper seeks to gather a syllabus of leading social principles from that immortal document, which called forth letters of thanks from the Emperor of Germany and the President of the French Republic, and which shows that the head of the church as the reverend counselor of states is the father of Christians and the friend of the people.

What task more arduous than to define the rights and the duties of the rich and of the poor, of capital and labor? What more perilous than to discuss the foundations of society when every word is scanned by crafty agitators, enemies of peace and order? Yet what more humane than to extinguish the members of the mighty conflict which threatens the very foundations of society, than to alleviate the hardships suffered by the defenseless victims of the un-Christian laws, greedy competition, rapacious usury and despotic monopolies and trusts?

All agree, arid no one can deny, that some remedy must be found, and quickly found, for the misery and wretchedness which press so heavily at this moment on the large majority of the very poor. But where is it to be found?

Socialism steps forward and answers: I have found it; I am the redeemer of society. I will invest all property in the state; I will give it the sole administration, and it shall distribute to each according to his needs. Thus I will abolish poverty and bring back the golden age of universal equality.

"No," replies the Holy Father. "Your project is at once futile, unjust and pernicious. It is futile, for if all goods must forever remain in common, where is the workingman s hope of bettering his condition by industry and economy? Where is his liberty, his inalienable right to invest his wages permanently and profitably, to dispose freely of the fruit of his sweat?

But above all, it is emphatically unjust. Centralization of property in the state violates natural rights. The state cannot take away the right to acquire property, for this right is from God, who made man in His own image and likeness, and said Let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping thing. We see this natural right by the light of pure reason, and see it in ever-recurring necessities, and in nature's first law of self-preservation. We see it in our intelligence, which surveys the vast outward world of countless objects necessary and useful for the support of life, and which joins the future to the present. We see it in our free will, which directs and guides us under things best suited to each of us. And no matter how primitive a condition of man be conceived, even though no state existed, yet if a man occupy for his exclusive use any of the goods of earth or any spot on its surface which no other has occupied, it becomes his, and if besides occupying it he expends on it the labor of his hand or his mind, he stamps it with his own personality, and to dispossess him would be to rob him of his labor.

"This natural right to acquire and hold property is manifested more clearly still in the rights and duties of the father of the family. What right more clear, what duty more sacred for the father than to provide for his offspring against the wretchedness of want in this mortal life ? Yet by what other means can this sacred duty be fulfilled than by this acquisition and ownership of permanent property, to be transmitted by inheritance?

True, the state may regulate exercise of these natural rights, and in the exercise of this power to regulate the transmission of property by inheritance, or testamentary gift, may it not correct to some extent the great evil of our times, the accumulation of millions on millions by single individuals or families, by the imposition of such inheritance taxes as will not only provide some relief to the suffering poor from the heavy burdens of taxation, but secure a fund for the merely frugal support of industrious worldngmen in times of hardship? The state may even enter the domestic circle to protect the members of the family, but the state cannot usurp or absorb the parental authority, or destroy its very life, by assuming the control of all property.

Taken from "Leo XIII: The Great White Shephard of Christendom

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The Reformers And The Reformed Are Alike/2

by Hilaire Belloc

What of the second factor, the gambling chance which the Capitalist system, with its necessary condition of freedom, of the legal power to bargain fully, and so forth, permits to the proletarian of escaping from his proletariat surroundings?

Of this gambling chance and the effect it has upon men's minds we may say that, while it has not disappeared, it has very greatly lost in force during the last forty years. One often meets men who tell one, whether they are speaking in defence of or against the Capitalist system, that it still blinds the proletarian to any common consciousness of class, because the proletarian still has the example before him of members of his class, whom he has known, rising (usually by various forms of villainy) to the position of capitalist. But when one goes down among the working men themselves, one discovers that the hope of such a change in the mind of any individual worker is now exceedingly remote. Millions of men in great groups of industry, notably in the transport industry and in the mines, have quite given up such an expectation. Tiny as the chance ever was, exaggerated as the hopes in a lottery always are, that tiny chance has fallen in the general opinion of the workers to be negligible, and that hope which a lottery breeds is extinguished. The proletarian now regards himself as definitely proletarian, nor destined within human likelihood to be anything but proletarian.

These two factors, then, the memory of an older condition of economic freedom, and the effect of a hope individuals might entertain of escaping from the wage-earning class, the two factors which might act most strongly against the acceptation of the Servile State by that class, have so fallen in value that they offer but little opposition to the third factor in the situation which is making so strongly for the Servile State, and which consists in the necessity all men acutely feel for sufficiency and for security. It is this third factor alone which need be seriously considered to-day, when we ask ourselves how far the material upon which social reform is working, that is, the masses of the people, may be ready to accept the change.

The thing may be put in many ways. I will put it in what I believe to be the most conclusive of all.

If you were to approach those millions of families now living at a wage, with the proposal for a contract of service for life, guaranteeing them employment at what each regarded as his usual full wage, how many would refuse?

Such a contract would, of course, involve a loss of freedom: a life-contract of the kind is, to be accurate, no contract at all. It is the negation of contract and the acceptation of status. It would lay the man that undertook it under an obligation of forced labour, coterminous and coincident with his power to labour. It would be a permanent renunciation of his right (if such a right exists) to the surplus values created by his labour. If we ask ourselves how many men, or rather how many families, would prefer freedom(with its accompaniments of certain insecurity and possible insufficiency) to such a life-contract, no one can deny that the answer is: "Very few would refuse it." That is the key to the whole matter.

What proportion would refuse it no one can determine; but I say that even as a voluntary offer, and not as a compulsory obligation, a contract of this sort which would for the future destroy contract and re-erect status of a servile sort would be thought a boon by the mass of the proletariat to-day.

Now take the truth from another aspect by considering it thus from one point of view and from another we can appreciate it best. Of what are the mass of men now most afraid in a Capitalist State? Not of the punishments that can be inflicted by a Court of Law, but of "the sack."

You may ask a man why he does not resist such and such a legal infamy; why he permits himself to be the victim of fines and deductions from which the Truck Acts specifically protect him; why he cannot assert his opinion in this or that matter; why he has accepted, without a blow, such and such an insult.

Some generations ago a man challenged to tell you why he forswore his manhood in any particular regard would have answered you that it was because he feared punishment at the hands of the law; to-day he will tell you that it is because he fears unemployment.

Private law has for the second time in our long European story overcome public law, and the sanctions which the Capitalist can call to the aid of his private rule, by the action of his private will, are stronger than those which the public Courts can impose.

In the seventeenth century a man feared to go to Mass lest the judges should punish him. To-day a man fears to speak in favour of some social theory which he holds to be just and true lest his master should punish him. To deny the rule of public powers once involved public punishments, which most men dreaded, though some stood out. To deny the rule of private powers involves to-day a private punishment against the threat of which very few indeed dare to stand out.

Look at the matter from yet another aspect. A law is passed (let us suppose) which increases the total revenue of a wage-earner, or guarantees him against the insecurity of his position in some small degree. The administration of that law requires, upon the one hand, a close inquisition into the man's circumstances by public officials, and, upon the other hand, the administration of its benefits by that particular Capitalist or group of Capitalists whom the wage-earner serves to enrich. Do the Servile conditions attaching to this material benefit prevent a proletarian in England to-day from preferring the benefit to freedom? It is notorious that they do not.

No matter from what angle you approach the business, the truth is always the same. That great mass of wage-earners upon which our society now reposes understands as a present good all that will increase even to some small amount their present revenue and all that may guarantee them against those perils of insecurity to which they are perpetually subject. They understand and welcome a good of this kind, and they are perfectly willing to pay for that good the corresponding price of control and enregimentation, exercised in gradually increasing degree by those who are their paymasters.

It would be easy by substituting superficial for fundamental things, or even by proposing certain terms and phrases to be used in the place of terms and phrases now current it would be easy, I say, by such methods to ridicule or to oppose the prime truths, which I am here submitting. They nonetheless remain truths.

Substitute for the term " employee " in one of our new laws the term "serf," even do so mild a thing as to substitute the traditional term " master " for the word "employer," and the blunt words might breed revolt. Impose of a sudden the full conditions of a Servile State upon modern England, and it would certainly breed revolt. But my point is that when the foundations of the thing have to be laid and the first great steps taken, there is no revolt; on the contrary, there is acquiescence and for the most part gratitude upon the part of the poor. After the long terrors imposed upon them through a freedom unaccompanied by property, they see, at the expense of losing a mere legal freedom, the very real prospect of having enough and not losing it.

All forces, then, are making for the Servile State in this the final phase of our evil Capitalist society in England. The generous reformer is canalised towards it; the ungenerous one finds it a very mirror of his ideal; the herd of "practical" men meet at every stage in its inception the "practical " steps which they expected and demanded; while that proletarian mass upon whom the experiment is being tried have lost the tradition of property and of freedom which might resist the change, and are most powerfully inclined to its acceptance by the positive benefits which it confers.

It may be objected that however true all this may be, no one can, upon such theoretical grounds, regard the Servile State as something really approaching us. We need not believe in its advent (we shall be told) until we see the first effects of its action.

To this I answer that the first effects of its action are already apparent The Servile State is, in industrial England to-day, no longer a menace but something in actual existence. It is in process of construction. The first main lines of it are already plotted out; the cornerstone of it is already laid.

To see the truth of this it is enough to consider laws and projects of law, the first of which we already enjoy, while the last will pass from project to positive statute in due process of time.

APPENDIX ON "BUYING-OUT'

There is an impression abroad among those who propose to expropriate the Capitalist class for the benefit of the State, but who appreciate the difficulties in the way of direct confiscation, that by spreading the process over a sufficient number of years and pursuing it after a certain fashion bearing all the outward appearances of a purchase, the expropriation could be effected without the consequences and attendant difficulties of direct confiscation. In other words, there is an impression that the State could "buy-out " the Capitalist class without their knowing it, and that in a sort of painless way this class can be slowly conjured out of existence.

The impression is held in a confused fashion by most of those who cherish it, and will not bear a clear analysis. It is impossible by any jugglery to "buy-out" the universality of the means of production without confiscation. To prove this, consider a concrete case which puts the problem in the simplest terms:

A community of twenty-two families lives upon the produce of two farms, the property of only two families out of that twenty-two.

The remaining twenty families are Proletarian. The two families, with their ploughs, stores, land, etc., are Capitalist,

The labour of the twenty proletarian families applied to the land and capital of these two capitalist families produces 300 measures of wheat, of which 200 measures, or 10 measures each, form the annual support of the twenty proletarian families ; the remaining 100 measures are the surplus value retained as rent, interest, and profit by the two Capitalist families, each of which has thus a yearly income of 50 measures.

The State proposes to produce, after a certain length of time, a condition of affairs such that the surplus values shall no longer go to the two Capitalist families, but shall be distributed to the advantage of the whole community, while it, the State, shall itself become the unembarrassed owner of both farms.

Now capital is accumulated with the object of a certain return as the reward of accumulation. Instead of spending his money, a man saves it with the object of retaining as the result of that saving a certain yearly revenue. The measure of this does not fall in a particular society at a particular time below a certain level. In other words, if a man cannot get a certain minimum reward for his accumulation, he will not accumulate but spend.

What is called in economics "The Law of Diminishing Returns" acts so that continual additions to capital, other things being equal (that is, the methods of production remaining the same), do not provide a corresponding increase of revenue. A thousand measures of capital applied to a particular area of natural forces will produce, for instance, 40 measures yearly, or 4 per cent. ; but 2000 measures applied in the same fashion will not produce 80 measures. They will produce more than the thousand measures did, but not more in proportion; not double. They will produce, say, 60 measures, or 3 per cent., upon the capital. The action of this universal principle automatically checks the accumulation of capital when it has reached such a point that the proportionate return is the least which a man will accept. If it falls below that he will spend rather than accumulate. The limit of this minimum in any particular society at any particular time gives the measure to what we call "the Effective Desire of Accumulation." Thus in England to-day it is a little over 3 per cent. The minimum which limits the accumulation of capital is a mimimum return of about one-thirtieth yearly upon such capital, and this we may call for shortness the "E.D.A." of our society at the present time.

When, therefore, the Capitalist estimates the full value of his possessions, he counts them in "so many years' purchase."* And that means that he is willing to take in a lump sum down for his possessions so many times the yearly revenue which he at present enjoys. If his E.D.A. is *By an illusion which clever statesmanship could use to the advantage of the community, he even estimates the natural forces he controls (which need no accumulation, but are always present) on the analogy of his capital, and will part with them at "so many years' purchase." It is by taking advantage of this illusion that land purchase schemes (as in Ireland) happily work to the advantage of the dispossessed.

So far so good. Let us suppose the two Capitalists in our example to have an E.D.A. of one-thirtieth. They will sell to the State if the State can put up 3000 measures of wheat.

Now, of course, the State can do nothing of the kind. The accumulations of wheat being already in the hands of the Capitalists, and those accumulations amounting to much less than 3000 measures of wheat, the thing appears to be a deadlock.

But it is not a deadlock if the Capitalist is a fool. The State can go to the Capitalists and say: "Hand me over your farms, and against them I will give you guarantee that you shall be paid rather more than 100 measures of wheat a year for the thirty years. In fact, I will pay you half as much again until these extra payments amount to a purchase of your original stock."

Out of what does this extra amount come ? Out of the State's power to tax.

The State can levy a tax upon the profits of both Capitalists A and B, and pay them the extra with their own money.

In so simple an example it is evident that this "ringing of the changes" would be spotted by the victims, and that they would bring against it precisely the same forces which they would bring against the much simpler and more straightforward process of immediate confiscation.

But it is argued that in a complex State, where you are dealing with myriads of individual Capitalists and thousands of particular forms of profit, the process can be masked.

There are two ways in which the State can mask its action (according to this policy). It can buy out first one small area of land and capital out of the general taxation and then another, and then another, until the whole has been transferred ; or it can tax with peculiar severity certain trades which the rest who are left immune will abandon to their ruin, and with the general taxation plus this special taxation buy out those unfortunate trades which will, of course, have sunk heavily in value under the attack.

The second of these tricks will soon be apparent in any society, however complex; for after one unpopular trade had been selected for attack the trying on of the same methods in another less unpopular field will at once rouse suspicion.*

The first method, however, might have some chance of success, at least for a long time after it was begun, in a highly complex and numerous society were it not for a certain check which comes in of itself. That check is the fact that the Capitalist only takes more than his old yearly revenue with the object of reinvesting the surplus.

I have a thousand pounds in Brighton railway stock, yielding me 3 per cent. : 30(pounds) a year. The Government asks me to exchange my bit of paper against another bit of paper guaranteeing the payment of (pounds)50 a year, that is, an extra rate a year, for so many years as will represent over and above the regular interest paid a purchase of my stock. The Government's bit of paper promises to pay to the holder 50pounds a year for, say, thirty-eight years. I am delighted to make the exchange, not because I am such a fool as to enjoy the prospect of my property being extinguished at the end of thirty-eight years, but because I hope to be able to reinvest the extra 20 every year in something else that will bring me in 3 per cent. Thus, at the end of the thirty-eight years I shall (or my heirs) be better off than I was at the beginning of the transaction, and I shall have enjoyed during its maturing my old 30 pounds a year all the same.

The State can purchase thus on a small scale by subsidising purchase out of the general taxation. It can, therefore, play this trick over a small area and for a short time with success. But the moment this area passes a very narrow limit the " market for investment " is found to be restricted, Capital automatically takes alarm, the State can no longer offer its paper guarantees save at an enhanced price. If it tries to turn the position by further raising taxation to what Capital regards as "confiscatory" rates, there will be opposed to its action just the same forces as would be opposed to frank and open expropriation.

The matter is one of plain arithmetic, and all the confusion introduced by the complex mechanism of "finance" can no more change the fundamental and arithmetical principles involved than can the accumulation of triangles in an ordnance survey reduce the internal angles of the largest triangle to less than 180 degrees.* In fine: if you desire to confiscate, you must confiscate.

You cannot outflank the enemy, as Financiers in the city and sharpers on the race-course outflank the simpler of mankind, nor can you conduct the general process of expropriation upon a muddle-headed hope that somehow or other something will come out of nothing in the end.

There are, indeed, two ways in which the State could expropriate without meeting the resistance that must be present against any attempt at confiscation. But the first of these ways is precarious, the second insufficient.

They are as follows :

(i) The State can promise the Capitalist a larger yearly revenue than he is getting in the expectation that it, the State, can manage the business better than the Capitalist, or that some future expansion will come to its aid. In other words, if the State makes a bigger profit out of the thing than the Capitalist, it can buy out the Capitalist just as a private individual with a similar business proposition can buy him out.

But the converse of this is that if the State has calculated badly, or has bad luck, it would find itself endowing the Capitalists of the future instead of gradually extinguishing them.

In this fashion the State could have "socialised " without confiscation the railways of this country if it had taken them over fifty years ago, promising the then owners more than they were then obtaining. But if it had socialised the hansom cab in the nineties, it would now be supporting in perpetuity that worthy but extinct type the cab-owner (and his children for ever) at the expense of the community.

The second way in which the State can expropriate without confiscation is by annuity. It can say to such Capitalists as have no heirs or care little for their fate if they have: "You have only got so much time to live and to enjoy your 30, will you take 50 until you die?" Upon the bargain being accepted the State will, in process of time, though not immediately upon the death of the annuitant, become an unembarrassed owner of what had been the annuitant's share in the means of production. But the area over which this method can be exercised is a very small one. It is not of itself a sufficient instrument for the expropriation of any considerable field.

I need hardly add that as a matter of fact the so-called "Socialist" and confiscatory measures of our time have nothing to do with the problem here discussed. The State is indeed confiscating, that is, it is taxing in many cases in such a fashion as to impoverish the tax-payer and is lessening his capital rather than shearing his income. But it is not putting the proceeds into the means of production. It is either using them for immediate consumption in the shape of new official salaries or handing them over to another set of Capitalists.*

But these practical considerations of the way in which sham Socialist experiments are working belong rather to my next section, in which I shall deal with the actual beginnings of the Servile State in our midst.

* Thus the money levied upon the death of some not very wealthy squire and represented by, say, locomotives in the Argentine, turns into two miles of palings for the pleasant back gardens of a thousand new officials under the Inebriates Bill, or is simply handed over to the shareholders of the Prudential under the Insurance Act. In the first case the locomotives have been given back to the Argentine, and after a long series of exchanges have been bartered against a great number of wood -palings from the Baltic not exactly reproductive wealth. In the second case the locomotives which used to be the squire's hands become, or their equivalent becomes, means of production in the hands of the Sassoons.

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Are We Reactionary?

by G.K. Chesterton

In our last issue Sir Henry Slesser quoted at length from the debates of the House of Commons a perfectly lucid and logicial and solid criticism of the social policy which we pursue. It was by Mr. Montague, a Labour member; and apparently the only Labour member to maintain what many suppose to be the whole Labour policy. He criticised our conception from the point of view of the old Fabian intellectual; who did at least differ from many other intellectuals by the possession of an intellect. This criticism, being concerned with fundamental and essential questions of public policy, was very little reported in the press. Newspapers are necessarily limited in their space; and we who are beginners would be the last to deny the difficulties of making up a page. And if the newspapers were to admit into their columns any considerable discussion of what is to happen to the English land or the English labouring class, they would find it impossible to print at length the fourth housemaid's fifth reiteration, in the witness box, that she never saw anything particular about the demeanour of Captain Bingle towards Lady Brown. We should be driven to content ourselves with only five photographs of people paddling in the summer or ski-ing in the winter. We shall endeavour to provide Mr. Montague with an adequate reply, but we feel some pride in the fact that we are probably among the few who will give him even an adequate report.

It is necessary to deal here with the charge of being reactionary and what is really implied in it. It is popularly expressed, as our contributor has noted, in the common phrase about putting back the clock. It makes the brain reel to think how how many million times we have been told that we cannot put back the clock. It is strange that people should use the same mechanical metaphor in the sam mechanical spirit so many times without once seeing what is wrong with it. It looks rather as if their clocks, anyhow, had stopped. If there is one thing in the world that no sane man ought to connect with the idea of unlimited progress, it is a clock. A clock does not strike twelve and then go on to strike thirteen or fourteen. If a clock really proceeded on the progressive or evolutionary principle, we should find it was half-past a hundred in about a week. So far as the significance of the signs go, which is the only value of a clock, the case is altogether the other way. You do not need to put the clock back; because in that sense the clock always puts itself back. It always returns to its first principle and its primary purpose; and in that respect at nay rate it is really a good metaphor for a social scheme. The clock that had completely forgotten the meaning of one and two would be valueless; the commonwealth that has completely forgotten the meaning of individual dignity and direct ownership will never recover them by going blindly forward to an infinity of number; it must return to reality. It must be reactionary, if that is reaction.

But if that is reaction, a great many other things are reactionary. For instance, a Trade Union was and is utterly reactionary. Indeed, when it first appeared it was regarded as reactionary; especially by the people who then considered themselves most progressive. It was regarded by the Radical of the industrial revolution as a piece of unscientific sentimentalism and ignorant discontent. And so it was, upon the principles then counted scientific. The Trade Union was reactionary if the Manchester School was progressive. And the Manchester School was certainly thought itself progessive; and indeed everybody else thought so, too; it was not only praised as progressive but dreaded and denounced as progressive. What is the use, therefore, of Mr. Montague throwing the word "reactionary" at us, when his own grandfather might have thrown the word "reactionary" at him? The Trade Union reacted almost automatically towards the tradition of the Guild because individualism was driving on indefinitely to insanity; because that mechanical clock had gone mad, and was striking a million. We react towards the tradition of the peasant because the divorce between property and personality has become equally impossible; so that a man is not even a clock but one of the works of a clock.

If we can dispute with Mr. Montague over the term "reactionary" we might dispute with him still more over the term "medieval." About that we have a very simple thing to say. If Mr. Montague will get into a little boat and sail away from his native land in any direction whatever (short of the North Pole) he will probably land in a country where small ownership is a living, thriving, staring modern reality, in a greater or less degree according to the inroads of the last "progressive" fad of industrialism. If he goes west and lands in Ireland he will find it. If he goes east and lands in Denmark he will find it. If he goes almost anywhere he will find it much more fully developed than he will find it here. Everywhere doubtless it is modified or thwarted; everywhere doubtless it might be improved; but everywhere it is a thing of the present. If anything in the world is modern, small property is modern. He might as well say the decimel coinage is medieval; for almost every place which has a decimel coinage has some measure of small property. He might as well say Napoleon was a medieval figure; for this tendency has largely followed the code Napoleon. In a legal or strictly historical sense, indeed, Mr. Montague's implication is wildly correct. Medieval civilisation was indeed progressing towards private property for all, when it was split asunder by that strange earthquake whether economic or theological. But medieval civilisation started with the legal fiction of feudalism, by which the land belonged to the King; that is, to the State. In other words medieval civilisation started with the fiction of Socialism. It is Mr. Montague who is medieval. It is Mr. Montague who is reacting towards the first heraldic fictions of the feudal age. We hand him back the emblazoned escutcheon with a bow. Modern Europe, swarming with prosaic and practical peasants, is good enough for us.

Of course, we know what he really means, whether he knows it or not, by our being medieval. He means something that has many other euphemisms. He means something that has survived medievalism thought it made medievalism, just as it survived feudalism though it mitigated feudalism, just as it survived slavery though it dissolved slavery. We know its name if he does not; and we beg to inform him that this also is an exceedingly modern institution. If he will sail round the world in his little boat, he will find out how modern. But nobody expects him to argue on the assumption of Catholic Christianity, and therefore it is irrelevant to deal with that matter here. We will only say that, if he cares for a hint about the nature of the thing in its varied effects, he will find it in the notion of the Will which is at the root of all liberty. Because that philosophy favours voluntary association, it supports Guilds and Trades Unions; because it believes in a province for volition it favours property. And he will find this study more philosophical than playing with a clock and talking of politics in terms of time. It is bad enough when he merely calls that reactionary to-day which was reactionary yesterday.

We shall find an opportunity elsewhere of discussing in greater detail the practical criticisms involved in Mr. Montague's most interesting speech; here we are only concerned with the particular reproach of reaction. But in a general fashion we may say this. Mr. Montague's ideal society is one in which no man will ever have any real control; even over himself. The advantage of the plan he deprecated, the plan by which each worker in a factory might also be an independent worker on the land, is that each man would have something to fall back upon, and that is fundamental. Suppose, for instance, there is a strike; presumably in that case there will be a strike fund. We certainly have never indulged in the vulgar, grumbling, against strike funds or strikes. But after all a strike fund must be in the hands of officials; just as all the money of the Treasury is in the hands of officials. In theory we have control over the money in the Treasury. In practice, men may come to have as little control over the Trade Union fund as over the Treasury. Of course, this iwll not affect one who does not want the people to rule; who would uphold the Trade Union against the Trade Unionists. But the people we want to rule are people and not offices. Against the despotic thing called Supply we set the democratic thing called Demand.

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